by M. P. Shiel
condition of my skin held me fixed before the mirror.It is dry as parchment, and brown as the leaves of autumn.
'July l4.--Ul-Jabal is gone! And I am left a lonely, a desolate oldman! He said, though I swore it was false, that I had grown to mistrusthim! that I was hiding something from him! that he could live with meno more! No more, he said, should I see his face! The debt I owe him hewould forgive. He has taken one small parcel with him,--and is gone!
'July l5.--Gone! gone! In mazeful dream I wander with uncovered headfar and wide over my domain, seeking I know not what. The stone he haswith him--the precious stone of Saul. I feel the life-surge ebbing,ebbing in my heart.'
Here the manuscript abruptly ended.
Prince Zaleski had listened as I read aloud, lying back on his Moorishcouch and breathing slowly from his lips a heavy reddish vapour, whichhe imbibed from a very small, carved, bismuth pipette. His face, as faras I could see in the green-grey crepuscular atmosphere of theapartment, was expressionless. But when I had finished he turned fullyround on me, and said:
'You perceive, I hope, the sinister meaning of all this?'
'_Has_ it a meaning?'
Zaleski smiled.
'Can you doubt it? in the shape of a cloud, the pitch of a thrush'snote, the _nuance_ of a sea-shell you would find, had you only insight_enough_, inductive and deductive cunning _enough_, not only a meaning,but, I am convinced, a quite endless significance. Undoubtedly, in ahuman document of this kind, there is a meaning; and I may say at oncethat this meaning is entirely transparent to me. Pity only that you didnot read the diary to me before.'
'Why?'
'Because we might, between us, have prevented a crime, and saved alife. The last entry in the diary was made on the 15th of July. Whatday is this?'
'This is the 20th.'
'Then I would wager a thousand to one that we are too late. There isstill, however, the one chance left. The time is now seven o'clock:seven of the evening, I think, not of the morning; the houses ofbusiness in London are therefore closed. But why not send my man, Ham,with a letter by train to the private address of the person from whomyou obtained the diary, telling him to hasten immediately to SirJocelin Saul, and on no consideration to leave his side for a moment?Ham would reach this person before midnight, and understanding that thematter was one of life and death, he would assuredly do your bidding.'
As I was writing the note suggested by Zaleski, I turned and asked him:
'From whom shall I say that the danger is to be expected--from theIndian?'
'From Ul-Jabal, yes; but by no means Indian--Persian.'
Profoundly impressed by this knowledge of detail derived from sourceswhich had brought me no intelligence, I handed the note to the negro,telling him how to proceed, and instructing him before starting fromthe station to search all the procurable papers of the last few days,and to return in case he found in any of them a notice of the death ofSir Jocelin Saul. Then I resumed my seat by the side of Zaleski.
'As I have told you,' he said, 'I am fully convinced that our messengerhas gone on a bootless errand. I believe you will find that what hasreally occurred is this: either yesterday, or the day before, SirJocelin was found by his servant--I imagine he had a servant, though nomention is made of any--lying on the marble floor of his chamber, dead.Near him, probably by his side, will be found a gem--an oval stone,white in colour--the same in fact which Ul-Jabal last placed in theEdmundsbury chalice. There will be no marks of violence--no trace ofpoison--the death will be found to be a perfectly natural one. Yet, inthis case, a particularly wicked murder has been committed. There are,I assure you, to my positive knowledge forty-three--and in one islandin the South Seas, forty-four--different methods of doing murder, anyone of which would be entirely beyond the scope of the introspectiveagencies at the ordinary disposal of society.
'But let us bend our minds to the details of this matter. Let us askfirst, _who_ is this Ul-Jabal? I have said that he is a Persian, and ofthis there is abundant evidence in the narrative other than his merename. Fragmentary as the document is, and not intended by the writer toafford the information, there is yet evidence of the religion of thisman, of the particular sect of that religion to which he belonged, ofhis peculiar shade of colour, of the object of his stay at themanor-house of Saul, of the special tribe amongst whom he formerlylived. "What," he asks, when his greedy eyes first light on thelong-desired gem, "what is the meaning of the inscription 'Has'"--themeaning which _he_ so well knew. "One of the lost secrets of theworld," replies the baronet. But I can hardly understand a learnedOrientalist speaking in that way about what appears to me a very patentcircumstance: it is clear that he never earnestly applied himself tothe solution of the riddle, or else--what is more likely, in spite ofhis rather high-flown estimate of his own "Reason"--that his mind, andthe mind of his ancestors, never was able to go farther back in timethan the Edmundsbury Monks. But _they_ did not make the stone, nor didthey dig it from the depths of the earth in Suffolk--they got it fromsome one, and it is not difficult to say with certainty from whom. Thestone, then, might have been engraved by that someone, or by thesomeone from whom _he_ received it, and so on back into the dimnessesof time. And consider the character of the engraving--it consists of _amythological animal_, and some words, of which the letters "Has" onlyare distinguishable. But the animal, at least, is pure Persian. ThePersians, you know, were not only quite worthy competitors with theHebrews, the Egyptians, and later on the Greeks, for excellence in theglyptic art, but this fact is remarkable, that in much the same waythat the figure of the _scarabaeus_ on an intaglio or cameo is a prettyinfallible indication of an Egyptian hand, so is that of a priest or agrotesque animal a sure indication of a Persian. We may say, then, fromthat evidence alone--though there is more--that this gem was certainlyPersian. And having reached that point, the mystery of "Has" vanishes:for we at once jump at the conclusion that that too is Persian. ButPersian, you say, written in English characters? Yes, and it wasprecisely this fact that made its meaning one of what the baronetchildishly calls "the lost secrets of the world": for every successiveinquirer, believing it part of an English phrase, was thus hopelesslyled astray in his investigation. "Has" is, in fact, part of the word"Hasn-us-Sabah," and the mere circumstance that some of it has beenobliterated, while the figure of the mystic animal remains intact,shows that it was executed by one of a nation less skilled in the artof graving in precious stones than the Persians,--by a rude, mediaevalEnglishman, in short,--the modern revival of the art owing its origin,of course, to the Medici of a later age. And of this Englishman--whoeither graved the stone himself, or got some one else to do it forhim--do we know nothing? We know, at least, that he was certainly afighter, probably a Norman baron, that on his arm he bore the cross ofred, that he trod the sacred soil of Palestine. Perhaps, to prove this,I need hardly remind you who Hasn-us-Sabah was. It is enough if I saythat he was greatly mixed up in the affairs of the Crusaders, lendinghis irresistible arms now to this side, now to that. He was the chiefof the heterodox Mohammedan sect of the Assassins (this word, Ibelieve, is actually derived from his name); imagined himself to be anincarnation of the Deity, and from his inaccessible rock-fortress ofAlamut in the Elburz exercised a sinister influence on the intricatepolitics of the day. The Red Cross Knights called him Shaikh-ul-Jabal--the Old Man of the Mountains, that very nickname connectinghim infallibly with the Ul-Jabal of our own times. Now threewell-known facts occur to me in connection with this stone of the Houseof Saul: the first, that Saladin met in battle, and defeated, _andplundered_, in a certain place, on a certain day, this Hasn-us-Sabah,or one of his successors bearing the same name; the second, that aboutthis time there was a cordial _rapprochement_ between Saladin andRichard the Lion, and between the Infidels and the Christiansgenerally, during which a free interchange of gems, then regarded as ofdeep mystic importance, took place--remember "The Talisman," and the"Lee Penny"; the third, that soon after the fighters of Richard, andthen himself, returned to England, the Loculus or coffin of St. E
dmund(as we are informed by the _Jocelini Chronica_) was _opened by theAbbot_ at midnight, and the body of the martyr exposed. On suchoccasions it was customary to place gems and relics in the coffin, whenit was again closed up. Now, the chalice with the stone was taken fromthis loculus; and is it possible not to believe that some knight, towhom it had been presented by one of Saladin's men, had in turnpresented it to the monastery, first scratching uncouthly on itssurface the name of Hasn to mark its semi-sacred origin, or perhapsbidding the monks to do so? But the Assassins, now called, I think, "alHasani" or "Ismaili"--"that accursed _Ishmaelite_," the baronetexclaims in one place--still live, are still a flourishing sectimpelled by fervid religious fanaticisms. And where think you is theirchief place of
